Friday, July 19, 2013

Eloy Rodrigues on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

This is the sixth Q&A in a series
exploring the current state of Open Access (OA). On this occasion the questions are answered by Eloy Rodrigues, Portuguese librarian and Director of the University of Minho’s Documentation Services.

Eloy Rodrigues

In any movement there are those who talk about
what needs to be done and there are those who get on and do it. Judging by the limited number
of posts that Eloy Rodrigues has made to the primary
OA mailing list (GOAL) he does not belong to the former group. However, Google offers ample
evidence that he regularly gives business-like presentations
and workshops on OA.

But Rodrigues’ most important contribution
to OA is surely his practical work in helping to develop the essential building
blocks required for OA to become a reality — particularly the all-important infrastructure
needed to facilitate Green OA, or self-archiving. This includes creating interoperable institutional repositories
and introducing Open Access policies.

Who better to describe what Rodrigues has
contributed to the cause than de facto leader of the Open Access movement, Peter Suber? “Eloy
Rodrigues led the effort to adopt an OA mandate at the University of Minho in December 2004,” he
explains. “The Minho policy was one of the first two OA mandates anywhere,
which makes Eloy one of the first among the effective OA advocates anywhere.”

Above
all, Rodrigues’ work has shown that, when implemented correctly, Green OA is
the quickest and surest way for a university to make its research freely
available. This November the University of Minho’s institutional repository (RepositóriUM) will be ten
years old. During its lifetime the number of items deposited in the repository (articles,
conference papers, working papers, theses and dissertations, etc.) has grown
from a couple of hundred to more than 23,000.

What
UMinho’s experience has shown, however, is that it is not enough simply to build
a repository, and it is not even enough to then mandate researchers to deposit
their work in that repository — researchers also have to be incentivised to comply
with the mandate. This is evident in the graph below, which shows the annual growth in the number of
items deposited in RepositoriUM. Two upticks are apparent, the
first occurred after the university first introduced its mandate in 2004, the
second (in 2011) after the mandate was upgraded to provide greater
incentives to researchers to comply. Compliance with the University of Minho’s OA mandate is currently
approaching 70 percent.

Number of new items
deposited in RepositoriUM by year

But how does Rodrigues view the
current state of OA, and what does he feel still needs to be done? To find out,
read the Q&A below.

For me what stands out from Rodrigues’
answers is his assertion that how OA develops from now on will to a great
extent depend on who drives it. Above all, he says, this will determine whether
the costs of scholarly communication will be driven down — a long desired
objective of the research community.

As he puts it, “[I]f, and how much,
cheaper it will be will depend to a great extent on what kind of transition to OA
we have. If we have a ‘research-driven’ transition — where research
organizations and researchers assume a greater role and responsibility for
disseminating and publishing their own results, there should be sufficient pressure
to squeeze down publishing costs and publisher profits to a quasi-optimal
level. In such a scenario I am pretty confident that OA will be much cheaper.

“If, on the other hand, the research
community accepts a ‘publishing-driven’ transition, where costs, prices and
profit margins all remain primarily in the control of publishers, there will be
little incentive to reduce costs and prices, and OA could end up being little
cheaper than the current model.”

What remains to be seen, of course, is
the extent to which the research community is either willing or able to “take
back” scholarly publishing. On this, we could note, University of Utah
librarian Rick Anderson has recently expressed some scepticism.

Nevertheless Rodrigues makes an
important point: the OA movement has arrived at a key turning point, a turning
point that will likely determine how scholarly communication evolves, not just
in the next few years, but in the long term. When and how (even whether) the research
community benefits from the change remains to be seen.

A: It’s hard to indicate a
specific point in time, but I would say that I started to be interested in Open
Access from the end of 2002. However, it was more than year later before I fully
understood the overall potential and implications of OA, and it was at that
time that I became an active Open Access advocate.

My
interest started as a result of several events that took place at the end of
2002: Having become the Director of
Minho University (UMinho) libraries in December 2002, I wanted to implement a
solution for the preservation and ongoing access of Minho’s theses and dissertations.
It was at that time that I also first became aware of the concept of
institutional repositories, and in December of that year an Open Archives
Forum Workshop
about OAI-PMH was organized in Lisbon (I didn’t attend personally, but asked a
colleague to participate). As a consequence, by the end of January 2003 we had
decided to create an institutional repository — not only for theses and
dissertations, but for all the university’s research output. That led to a
growing interest on Open Access.

Our
institutional repository — RepositóriUM — was
publicly launched in November 2003, but we pretty soon “discovered” that
creating a repository doesn’t mean that researchers will immediately start to
self-archive their publications in it. Conscious by now that others were facing
the same problem I began to engage in advocacy, and subsequently led the
efforts to introduce an OA policy and mandate at Minho. At the end of 2004,
therefore, UMinho established a self-archiving policy by a Rectors decision.

This
also led to my becoming an increasingly active Open Access advocate, not just at
UMinho but elsewhere...

Q:
What would you say have been the biggest achievements of the OA movement to
date, and what have been the biggest disappointments?

A: Probably like most OA
advocates I always experience mixed feelings when trying to assess our progress
towards OA. On one hand it’s indisputable that we’ve made tremendous progress, and
in a short period of time. When the original Budapest meeting was convened
in 2001, “Open Access” (at that point still not defined) was “marginal”, practised
by a very small number of researchers (physicists aside) and
completely unknown to the vast majority of people working in research and academia.
Today OA is “mainstream”, recognized and accepted by almost all researchers, required
by a growing number of research funders, and the percentage of research output available
as Open Access is now estimated to be close to one third of the total. In
Portugal, we have moved from one repository in 2003, to more than 40 in 2013, from
no Open Access journals to more than 80, from no Open
Access policies to 15 Open Access
policies
introduced in research institutions. This is certainly very impressive! So I
think the OA movement can be proud of making, in just 11 years, Open Access
inevitable. That is the biggest achievement and I’m convinced that there is no
turning back anymore.

On
the other hand, progress towards OA has not been as “linear”, or as fast, as
some of us would have anticipated or wanted, or even as fast as is possible. There
are many objective reasons for this (e.g. the diversity of contexts — from
disciplinary to national ones — and stakeholders: researchers, research funders
and policy makers, research institutions, libraries, publishers, etc.). There
are also subjective reasons — from the challenges in establishing co-ordinated
positions within the OA movement, to the consequences of the efforts made by
opponents of Open Access to stop or slow progress (often operating behind the
scenes).

I
have been particularly disappointed over the last year to see how a move (the
new RCUK OA policy) that was intended
to foster OA, has contributed to a more confused landscape, and could have some
very dangerous consequences — e.g. the wasting of research resources by
diverting even more money into a currently very well (if not over) financed
publishing industry, the downgrading of green OA, the lengthening
of embargoes etc., etc.). The impact of this will not be confined to the UK,
but will have implications worldwide.

Q:
There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about the
roles that Green and Gold OA should play.
What do you think should be the respective roles of Green and Gold today, especially
in the context of Southern Europe and the Portuguese-speaking world?

A: I firmly believe that both Green
and Gold OA are useful and valid approaches during the transition to OA, as
originally stated in the BOAI Declaration. My work has
been focused so far on promoting repositories and green OA (through RCAAP and its repository
hosting service),
but I’ve supported several initiatives, in Portugal and elsewhere, focused on
OA journal creation and development (e.g. the RCAAP journal hosting service).

But
as SPARC’s Heather Joseph stated in her Q&A earlier in
this series, when it comes to policies, requiring deposition in an OA repository
is the baseline requirement. Fortunately, this has been the requirement of most
institutional and funder policies. And the reason why universal Green OA
mandates should remain the baseline for funder and institutional policies is that,
not only do they offer an immediate solution (even with temporary limitations related
to embargoes and/or re-use rights) for open access, but they exert pressure and
provide incentives for the establishment and operation of what Stevan Harnad calls “fair gold”.

In
Portugal, as in other Southern European countries (especially those participating
in the MedOANet project,
which is preparing guidelines for effective and co-ordinated OA policy
implementation), the baseline on Green is particularly relevant, because in
addition to the reasons I mentioned above, we face a severe economic and
financial crisis. So it would be a complete nonsense to divert our increasingly
scarce national research funds to paying to publish in OA journals (after all,
since we will need to maintain our journal subscriptions during the transition,
paying for APCs would require additional and unnecessary expense).

That
said, I think we should maintain support for very relevant, and research
driven, Gold OA initiatives in the Portuguese speaking world.

A: I understand that Hybrid OA
could, theoretically, be a good way of transitioning to Open Access. But I fear
that, in practice, Hybrid OA is not providing a valid and fair strategy for the
transitional period. In fact, despite a few examples of genuine commitment from
publishers, the truth is that for most of the “big players” Hybrid OA seems to
be essentially an opportunity to increase revenues by “double dipping”.

One
essential (but certainly not sufficient) condition that would be needed in
order for Hybrid OA to work on a “fair” and useful way for OA, would be
complete transparency about subscription revenues and publication costs. But
transparency is simply not possible in a market now dominated by “big deals” (often
with confidentiality clauses attached) between publishers and different types
of consortia.

So,
I think Hybrid OA should not be supported, or at least stimulated, and I agree
with those funders who will only pay APCs for pure Gold journals and not Hybrid
ones.

Q:
How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in Portugal and globally?

A: I think we are living in very
interesting and crucial times for OA, both in Portugal and at the global level.
As I indicated, I’m personally convinced that OA is already an inevitability.
So, the question now is how and when we will get there, and who will lead the
transition to Open Access. I think even those who were opposing Open Access
have come to understood that, and they have started to concentrate on the
“battle” over OA implementation.

What
I am saying is that while I am convinced that OA is the future, I’m not
completely sure whether it will be a “research-driven OA”, or a “publishing-driven
OA”. Both scenarios are still possible, and the way in which we will transition
and implement OA will make a world of difference.

The
next few months will shed some light on the road ahead. Two of the most
influential events will certainly be the results of the political initiatives
in the US (the OSTP
Memorandum
and the proposed FASTR
legislation),
and the implementation details of the Open Access principle in Horizon 2020 in Europe. With
regard to the latter, I hope the universal requirement will be for publications
to be made available on the OpenAIRE
portal
(which I think should also be used for the reporting, monitoring and assessment
of EU funded projects).

A: There is still plenty of work
to be done. I would suggest there are two main priority areas. The first is the
way in which OA policies/mandates are defined and implemented by funders and
research institutions. Experience has shown that the most crucial factor in
trying bring us faster and closer to 100% OA is the existence of effective Open
Access mandates.

The
other priority relates to advocacy, dissemination and cultural change.“Open” is not yet the “default” in the
research community, and there are still many old habits, beliefs,
misconceptions, and fears, both among researchers and research organizations.
These are real obstacles to moving to Open Access and Open Science. Making
“open” the default, as defined in the Budapest meeting last year (BOAI10), and changing
the dominant research culture, will require a lot of advocacy work, and a lot
of education and training, in the coming years.

Policies
are more of an immediate to short term priority, while changing the research
culture is more of a medium to long term goal. But I think we need to act in
both directions now, as they will mutually reinforce each other.

Q:
What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should
focus on today?

A: I will point again to policies.
In the short term the factor that will have greatest impact on OA progress will
be our capacity to get good Open Access policies from funders and research
institutions.What do I mean by “good OA
policies”? I mean consistent, verifiable, monitored, enforceable and really
enforced policies. Policies with the baseline requirement of repository
deposition, and using repository deposition and availability as a reporting and
monitoring tool to assess and ensure compliance.

Another
challenge for OA advocates on the policy front is to try and ensure that policies
from different funders and institutions are convergent (or at least not
“competing”). This is crucial in the European context, as many researchers will
have to comply with policies from their institutions plus several national or
European research funders. It will be a nightmare if they are required to do a
set of different things for each of them.

Q:
What does OA have to offer the developing world?

A: Open Access offers the
opportunity — as proclaimed in the Budapest Declaration — to “lay the foundation
for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for
knowledge”. So, for the developing world, as for the rest of the world, OA
means enabling a two way dialogue.

Not
only will researchers, teachers and students from the developing world have the
opportunity (assuming Internet access is available) to access and use the
knowledge produced in any part of the world. At the same time they will have
the opportunity to disseminate and showcase the results of their own work. And
there are many relevant examples where Open Access repositories and Open Access
journals provide a global audience to research results, research that would
otherwise probably be confined to local scientists.

A: I hope that the most relevant
initiatives in Europe and the US that I mentioned above will have positive
outcomes. That will have a huge influence on OA progress in the coming years.

And
I particularly hope that the Portuguese national funder Open Access policy will
finally be approved and start to be implemented. That is the missing piece for
OA growth in Portugal.

Q:
Will OA publishing in your view be any less expensive than subscription
publishing? If so, why/how? Does cost matter anyway?

A: I’m convinced that OA will be
cheaper. That is, the cost per published article will be lower than it is today.
But if, and how much, cheaper it will be will depend to a great extent on what kind
of transition to OA we have. If we have a “research-driven” transition — where
research organizations and researchers assume a greater role and responsibility
for disseminating and publishing their own results, there should be sufficient
pressure to squeeze down publishing costs and publisher profits to a quasi-optimal
level. In such a scenario I am pretty confident that OA will be much cheaper.

If,
on the other hand, the research community accepts a “publishing-driven”
transition, where costs, prices and profit margins all remain primarily in the
control of publishers, there will be little incentive to reduce costs and
prices, and OA could end up being little cheaper than the current model.

And
yes, it matters a lot, because resources for research are limited, and if we
spend more than is necessary on publishing each article the money used to do so
will not be available to do, or to publish, more research.

----

Eloy Rodrigues is the Director of the
University of Minho Documentation Services. In 2003, Rodrigues led the project
to create Minho University’s institutional repository RepositoriUM, and in 2004
he drafted Minho University’s formal policy requiring open access to the
institution’s scientific output.

One of Rodrigues’ main focuses of
activity today is to promote and advocate for Open Access and institutional
repositories, both in Portugal and in the Portuguese-speaking world. As part of
that activity, since 2008 Rodrigues has led the technical team at Minho
University in developing the RCAAP
(Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal = Portugal Open Access
Science Repository) project.

1 comment:

I've known Eloy for some years now and know in what high regard he is held in Portugal. His comments are absolutely solidly based - the future is going to depend upon academics taking publication into their own hands; and the RCUK decision will be a disaster internationally. The publisher lobby, which loaded the Finch Committee in a totally blatant way, is making sure that its profits continue to rise at the expense of universities. As for lowering the cost of journal publication: free, subsidised journals is a valid route, as the existence of Information Research (http://informationr.net/ir/) for the past 18 years demonstrates! Self-publication of e-books also offers a new direction for scholarly monographs - see https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/336724 for an example - priced at $9.99 when the print version would have cost in the order of $75!